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Thank you for your kind response! You've made some good suggestions here.
i really like the diplomatic tack from your experience. And I believe that
is what my current manager is trying to do. I'm relatively new to the
team, but it's easy to see that she respects her writers, their
professionalism and creativity. Neat group to work for sure. I feel lucky.
Let me elaborate just a titch on what I think is happening here: what
broke the existing development system here was an acquisition that
increased department size by about 50%. Lead writers had been coordinating
work across product families, but the definitions of product families
became too fluid. Concurrently, the workload has become enormous--so much
so that we can only complete part of what's needed. Now there's a backlog
. . . and it's growing (hence, pain). We're in the midst of moving to
AuthorIt, which adds work in itself although it will be a huge help in the
long run. The addition of all the new products means that release dates
are no longer as predictable as they used to be, and whew!--it's all just
getting out of hand. We'd like to know what really big teams do to keep
everything coordinated.
With this, would you have any other ideas?
Laura Ann Manning
Technical Writer
lamanning -at- mmm -dot- com
801-265-4689
To
lamanning -at- mmm -dot- com
cc
"Tech Whirlers" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject
Re: Growing workload, Growing pains
Hi Laura Ann:
If you have an experienced group. the easiest way to divide up the work is
to ask the members of your group which products they would like to work
on. (Even if they are not experienced, ask them which ones seem
interesting to them.) Then, let them look at the work involved, and ask
them to tell you if they need another writer to help some of the time, or
all of the time. Help them if you think they need it. Have department
status meetings weekly with your team. If someone has several products
that get "hot" at one time, reapportion the work load or assign someone to
help temporarily. Ask for volunteers first though :-)
I worked in a large writing department (15 writers) with hundreds of
products (in telecommunications) and we handled the work load this way.
There were few scheduling problems, because each person had several
maintenance products, and a couple of new ones, but at different stages of
development. If one person had too much to do all of a sudden, the other
writers helped them. It helped us all understand our product offerings
better.
It worked surprisingly well, and allowed writers to have some choice about
working on things that interested them. It's good to make suggestions
though. You can help writers to grow their skills by asking them to work
on a more technical product that requires 'stretching' a little.
Hope this helps.
PT
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:32 AM, <lamanning -at- mmm -dot- com> wrote:
Hello! I'm looking for information about how to divide a growing workload
among writers I am a new writer in a Health Information Systems doc group.
We write for 120 products, maintain 600+ documents (several output
formats). Any effective strategies/tools/medications out there??
Laura Ann Manning
Technical Writer
lamanning -at- mmm -dot- com
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printed documentation. Features include support for Windows Vista & 2007
Microsoft Office, team authoring, plus more. http://www.DocToHelp.com/TechwrlList
True single source, conditional content, PDF export, modular help.
Help & Manual is the most powerful authoring tool for technical
documentation. Boost your productivity! http://www.helpandmanual.com
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